274 pages ; 24 cm

Heidi, The Secret Garden, and Pollyanna are all classic "girls' books," featuring a miracle cure of an invalid character who literally gets up and walks away from illness or paralysis. Such stories were common in Victorian novels and they implicitly conveyed the idea that disability and physical suffering were punishment for wrongdoing: unruly girls could not enter womanhood unless they were tamed, and an accident was the perfect plot device for this transformation. Other characters, like Helen Burns in Jane Eyre or Beth in Little Women, were just too good to live, and died so that another character could be redeemed by their example. Lois Keith points out in this study that the temptation to either cure or kill off disabled characters has surprising tenacity. The widespread belief that a disabled life isn't a full life and that patients can cure themselves through force of will endures to the present day. In Take Up Thy Bed & Walk, Lois Keith brings her lively and observant eye to the classic books of childhood from Jane Eyre, Heidi, and Pollyanna, to modern American classics such as Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House on the Prairie and Judy Blume's Deenie. Keith explores the recurring images of impairment and ill health in literature and asks the reader to reconsider the messages they send to a devoted young audience. This book is also a testament to the singular passion with which these books are read by younger readers and reminds us of the intensity of our own reading experience as children

Includes bibliographical references (pages 250-256) and index

Introduction -- Punishment and pity: Images and representations of disability, illness and cure -- Too good to live: Deathbed scenes in Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre and Louisa May Alcott's Little Women -- Learning to be perfectly good: What Katy did / Susan Coolidge -- Miracle cures: Clara in Heidi by Johanna Spyri and Colin in The Secret Garden / Frances Hodgson Burnett -- Study of disability, class and gender: Pollyanna and Pollyanna Grows Up / Eleanor Porter -- Misrule, rebellion and death: Seven Little Australians / Ethel Turner -- What writers did next: Representations of disability in the second half of the Twentieth Century

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